Merchant Services

One this that bothered me about the Authorize.Net ARB subscription functionality is that there was a three year limit on subscriptions. In other words, all subscriptions would expire at most three years and you could not set it to be longer. This was true whether you used their ARB API or set the subscription up [...]

Amazon.com recently announced that they are entering the merchant services arena by offering their own in house payment system. Called Amazon Flexible Payments Service, or Amazon FPS for short, it is designed to be a direct competitor of Paypal and Google Checkout. An advantage it potentially offers over Google Checkout is through Amazon.com’s huge database [...]

When establishing your merchant account the acquiring bank that is reviewing your application is assessing the risk associated with establishing your account. They factor in many variables including ones associated with the product(s) you are selling. Different products have different risks associated with them. Let’s compare two products:

Pencils

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A common problem in ecommerce is fraudulent orders from overseas customers. The risk is so high in fact that some merchant account providers will not allow their merchants to accept orders from foreign countries. Even if they did, and you wished to solicit foreign orders, some regions pose such a high risk for fraud that [...]

A common question in communities around the Web is, “what exactly is a payment gateway”? According to Wikipedia:

A payment gateway is an e-commerce application service provider service that authorizes payments for e-businesses, online retailers, bricks and clicks, or traditional brick and mortar. It is the equivalent of a physical POS (Point-of-sale) terminal located in most [...]

From the press release:
Electronic payment company CyberSource Corp. said Monday it will acquire Authorize.Net, a provider of electronic merchant services, for $565 million in cash and stock.
Under the terms of the deal, Authorize.Net shareholders will receive 1.1611 shares of CyberSource (nasdaq: CYBS - news - people ) common stock for every share of Authorize.Net. They [...]

For merchants who use Authorize.Net to process their online orders if you accept orders from Canada and the UK you may be losing sales due to a flaw in how Authorize.Net handles Address Verification (AVS). (Read the blog entry The AVS Game to learn more about AVS). Apparently if the card issuing bank for a [...]

A common question we see asked online is, “What exactly is a Third Party Processor”? Well, a third party processor allows other businesses to share their merchant account. This means the merchants who shares their account doesn’t have to apply with a merchant account provider. They apply directly with the third party processor.
The ramification of [...]

Not being PCI compliant in the state of Minnesota will now cost you more then your merchant account. Last week the state passed a law that virtually made PCI compliance mandatory for online merchants. The law itself does not directly reference the PCI standards outlined by the major credit card issuers (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, [...]